SPACESHIP•TWO

Sir Richard Branson, daughter, Holly and son, Sam, plan to fly into sub-outerspace in August 2014. Sir Richard is the founder of Virgin Galactic. There have been 640 reservations made to fly on Virgin Galactic. Each ticket costs $250,000.

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ONE HUNDRED years ago, traveling to outer space was for dreamers, painters, and science fiction writers. But today we have such amazing companies as World View Enterprises. The company is making a little capsule (spaceship) that will travel to the edge of outer space. The edge is 19 miles (30 kilometers) above the earth. (Most commercial airplanes fly six to seven miles above earth.) It will take the capsule only two hours to reach this height. It will stay in space about two hours before coming down again. How, you wonder? And why?!

WORLD VIEW CAPSULE

Photos: World View Enterprises

A huge balloon filled with a gas called helium will lift the capsule from the earth. The first flight will take off from Tuscon, Arizona in America in the year 2016. It will carry eight people. Two of them will be pilots. Did you guess? The other six will be space tourists! Already you can buy a ticket for this flight for $75,000 dollars. It’s not very much, really, for the chance to see the blackness of outer space and our beautiful big blue globe.

But this is not all. The company Virgin Galactic is working on building a spaceship called SpaceShipTwo. It will also carry six space tourists and will be able to go 68 miles (110 kilometers) into space. At that point the space tourists will be weightless. You can watch videos below of both spaceships.

A wise man once said that when little children return to their house, they are happy and say, “Oh, I’m home!” When people get older and return to their city they say, “Oh, I’m home!” And later, when they come back to their country they say “Oh, I’m home!”

I hope some day you will fly into space and when you return to Earth you will say “Oh, I’m home!”